Full Story on Surveillance by Police Hasn't Been Disclosed, Plaintiffs Say

By JIM DWYER

Published: April 3, 2007

The police surveillance program leading up to the 2004 Republican National Convention was larger than previously disclosed to people who are suing the city over their arrests at the convention, according to papers filed in federal court yesterday.

But officials will oppose the release of additional documents about the surveillance, a city lawyer, Peter Farrell, said at a hearing yesterday on the lawsuits. He said the plaintiffs' request was too far-reaching. They want to see ''all documents from the intelligence division for a year and a half prior to the R.N.C.,'' he said.

Christopher Dunn, a lawyer for seven of the plaintiffs, said he was seeking intelligence reports only on people who had been planning to protest at the convention.

For more than a year before the convention, the Police Department monitored Web sites and sent undercover detectives around the nation to collect information on Bush opponents planning to demonstrate in New York. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has said the operation helped keep order.

The surveillance program accumulated files on a small number of people who were planning to cause trouble, but it also tracked the political views of others who had not expressed any intention of breaking the law, according to police documents.

In court yesterday, Mr. Dunn, the associate director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said, ''There was a whole part of the program for which no documents have been produced.'' In a letter filed with Federal District Court in Manhattan, Mr. Dunn wrote that during questioning last week of David Cohen, the deputy police commissioner for intelligence, Mr. Farrell ''represented that the intelligence documents produced on Jan. 19 reflected only a limited portion of the intelligence division's preconvention activity.''

Mr. Farrell dropped a charge that the civil liberties lawyers had violated a court order on confidentiality. Mr. Farrell had accused them of leaking police intelligence material to The New York Times for an article that revealed the existence of the surveillance program.

He suggested that the city would try to force The Times to disclose how it had obtained the information, arguing that The Times has only a ''qualified'' privilege to protect the sources for its article on March 25.